va7410 - what performance can we expect?

[Simon Galton]

We are currently debugging a performance problem in our Oracle Financials environment. We have two HP-UX 11i rp5405 systems with three CPUs, 8GB of RAM on the database and 16GB of RAM on the middle tier. They are getting their files from a shared va7410 connected via an HP Surestore 2GB switch.

Our DBAs are convinced the va7410 is the bottleneck and are measuring response rates of 40-215ms vs. 10-20ms with a table we put on a mirrored LV on our root disks for comparison. Is this normal?

Is there something outside of the Oracle environment I can run to test disk performance? I seem to remember an interesting script was attached to some messages here, but I can't find it at present (not enough sleep :)

Oh, the va7410 has 1GB of cache on each controller and were are using the 2gb FC cards on the servers.

Thanks in advance...

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Simon,
you're asking very tough question. Perfomance measurement is valid only if systems are configured properly, according perfomance guidelines.
First of all I would check VA/host/SAN configuration, and only then thought that something wrong is in hardware.
The best for you and the fastest is to open case with HP and ask them to check your setup.
Basic guidelines are to:
- have latest software/firmware (driver .10, firmware A100, brocade firmware up-to-date);
- have everything in fabric (N-ports);
- have correct host behavior and security table settings (if applicable);
- have hardware healthy ('supportshow' for switches, 'armdsp -a' and 'armlog -e' for VA, syslog.log for hosts)
Eugeny

[Simon Galton]

Eugeny - we are looking at this from all angles, but I recall an I/O baselining script on the forums a while back...

Simon

[Leif Halvarsson_2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Try the Postmark filesystem benchmark, you can download from:
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3022.html